QUILT: Supporting Modular Design of Machine-Knitting Programs

DOI

Knitting machines can manufacture complex layered, textured, and multi-material fabrics and garments. With new programming languages and interfaces there is greater access to the machine’s capabilities. Developers can now create machine instructions that produce a fabric sample or garment. Such files can be easily shared with others, but modifying and combining these samples requires extensive expertise in knitting-specific programming languages, substantial effort, and time. Knit programming offers little support for modular design. We take a step towards modular knitting-machine programming and present QUILT: Quality Unification Infrastructure for Loop-based Textiles. QUILT enables knit programmers to create swatches from knitting programs and lay these swatches out spatially on a 2-dimensional grid. We use three novel knit-program merging algorithms to merge the connected swatches into a quilt program. The knitted structures of each swatch remain unchanged, and our algorithms ensure that the swatches are joined by a seamless boundary that maintains the constraints of knitting-machine programming and knitted-structure construction.